What does it cost?#
Royal Academy of Engineering funded programme
For groups participating in the Royal Academy of Engineering-funded programme, it is free of charge, including our card game pack and one of our volunteer-built thermal monitors. You may face some incidental expenses for items like batteries and stationery, and you can charge these to expenses. Your volunteer engineer may also charge mileage costs for attending sessions. We have budgeted for an average of £25 in expenses for each group.
Photo by John McArthur on Unsplash
We are happy to discuss new programmes. The most expensive part is administration - recruiting groups, for instance. We are willing to work with organisations that wish to do administration in-house and just supply the services you need to make it work. We are happy to apply for funding in partnership with, or at least with the support of, organisations that have venues they would like to have undertake the programme. We are also happy to try to help groups that are not part of organised programmes.
Our materials are all freely accessible online without charge but there are still some unavoidable “per group” costs that must be met somehow. Here are our estimates:
Thermal Monitor. These are very important for discovering whether you can save energy by inexpensive changes to the current heating system and how you operate it, often leading to very quick financial savings. Commercial data loggers cost around £45 for one that saves temperature readings to a USB stick, or £70 if you have any concerns about damp or dryness so need to include relative humidity. Our design can be built by an electronics hobbyist for £10. In either case, the first battery is included and should last around a year. The batteries are around £5 each. Our design can send the readings to the internet. There are commercial loggers that can do this, but they are expensive. Groups can set up the internet themselves for free, or it costs us around £300 per year to host the data for them. If we have enough groups participating, that’s around £6 each.
Card Game. The HeatHack Card Game requires physical cards. It costs us around £13.50 per double-sided pack for us to print a bunch and have a volunteer post you one. It would cost you around £3.50 to print them on normal paper, but they wouldn’t hold up well to handling.
Printing and stationery. Groups vary in how much printing they do, but it’s very useful to be able to print a few copies of the site survey form, and if you don’t have a projector you will need some other pieces to hand during sessions. Sticky notes and a flip chart are also very useful. We estimate the total cost as well under £10.
Training. Many groups will want to have live training and we would need to pay trainers to deliver this. Please discuss your needs with us so we can work out what to do.